04 Mar How to create cartoon characters in Illustrator

Time to write a tutorial about vector mascot design in Illustrator. In this post I’ll explain you the design process I followed at the time to design Twisted Monkey cartoon character in vector format.

Briefing

First off I pass the Briefing, a series of key questions that helps you to understand the company goals and its requirements, to the client. It can be done in a more or less formal way.

Since the client is a company that produces horror movies, they didn’t request the typical cute monkey, we went with an edgy monkey mascot logo instead. We came up with the idea of including a straight jacket and and a bloody knife… lots of blood! It had to look fun, yet intriguing at the same time.

Traditional Drawing and Photoshop Retouches

Sketching with a Wacom Cintiq and Photoshop is fun and faster but it’s expensive, if you can’t afford it, you may start drawing the traditional way, with a paper and pencil then scan it and trace it with vector tools.

Traditional drawing on the left, photoshop retouches on the right.

I start sketching with a red pencil, when I’m satisfied with the results I redraw it with a normal pencil. As you may notice, it is a very loose sketch.

Unfortunately my line quality isn’t as good as some comic artists, no worries, we can scan it and make some improvements with Photoshop!

Once I get something potentially good I scan it into Photoshop and play around, I change the facial expressions, the pose and various other elements of the design… until I get something I like.

Take a look at how the character evolves during the creation process. It’s normal not starting with a very clear idea of what you are going to do, just have fun and spend some time for research.

Evolution of the personality of our character 😛

The sketching phase is the most important, don’t get disheartened if you can’t get it at the first attempt. Practice!

Cleaning and Inking in Photoshop

No matter if you work on bitmaps or vectors it’s critical working on high resolution (around 8.000 x 8.000 pixels) as you will work more more comfortably. If you work on bitmaps at the end of the process you can reescale the lineart down and all small imperfections will be gone, this will make the automatic vectorisation more accurate.

Clean sketch on the left, final inking on the right

Once we have a final sketch for the mascot character, I clean it in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet and assigning different line weights, then I proceed with the final inking.

Final inking, it’s very important to modulate the lines correctly.

Notice we have 3 types of lines: contours are the thicker lines, internal lines are thinner and transition lines starting as contour and getting inner.

Our digital inking must be as light and clean as possible.

– Don’t create shadows. – Don’t use extremely thick lines without any variation in thickness. – Don’t overload the inking with internal lines: just mark volume in a subtle way so they work as guide for the color. – Don’t use completely straight lines. – Don’t make really small details: your volumes must be as big as possible, otherwise you wont have sufficient space for the color.

Vectorizing in Illustrator

If you created your lineart with Photoshop vector tools you can open the PSD file directly in Illustrator and it will be completely editable.

If you opted for the Photoshop Brush Tool, we can open the file in Illustrator and vectorise our bitmap lineart by using Image Trace, it’s quite straight forward. Here is a video where I explain how to do it.

Plain colors

Assigning flat colors

Now we only have to fill each white area with the color we want, I use medium tones, not too dark or too light so, later on, we have room for the lights and shadows.

Adding gradients

We will use gradients of at least two different colors, but not extremely contrasting because we’ll add lights and shades later on. For now don’t pay too much attention to the gradient direction, we’re just choosing the color tones, later on we’ll orientate them to give coherence to the illumination.

We cut areas into smaller volumes

Cutting the areas

Now we fine tune the gradient colors so we get a coherent illumination. There’s a basic thumb rule: next to a dark color there’s always a light color.

Adding shadows

We’ll create a layer, in the transparency palette we change the blend mode to Multiply.

For the shadows we simply pick a flat or gradient color similar the one in the background and create the shadows. As it’s in multiply mode, it will interact with the background resulting a darker color.

Animation so you appreciate the shadows.

IMPORTANT : if you use shadows in Normal mode you’ll need a lot of adjustments to not to cover the black lines. Multiply mode makes the layer transparent on top of a black color so there is no adjustment needed.

Adding lights

In this case it’s not essential to use different layer modes, although you can always use the Screen blend mode to get lighter tones.

First off I make a soft illumination and later on I add some strong light areas in order to reinforce the contours.

Final Retouches

Now we only need to add some blood courtesy of free Gomedia vectors . The blood stains are in a Multiply layer on top just below the right eye.

Illustration is a complex issue and I didn’t cover all details in full, if you want to dig even more I suggest you take a look to the following tutorial. If you have any question you can also comment and I’ll try to answer it as soon as possible.

marcos

gladapple

This is wonderful. It’s always amazing to me when talented designers have enough time to give back like this, and help the newbies. I’ve always vectorized lines manually after cleaning them in photoshop, so thank you for making such a clear and helpful article.

Marcos

Didier

Hi, firt of all thks a lot for this tut it´s awesome and just what i been searching for !!!

I got a little problem after making of the silouhette. I made my path in photoshop, saved it as .tiff opened it in ilustrator made the silouhett with the same values and got my path vectorized but……i´ve a unique path and i can´t select any white area to start coloring.

Any idea of why? or how can i fix that?

Hop u could help me cuz otherwise i´ll have to colorate in photoshop and then i wouldn´t be able to resize it without losing resolution.

Tks for the answer, i let you my msn if u want to explain me directly:

Didier

Yeahhhh i was missing that the new layer group was a folder !! My bad is just i´m really new with ilustrator but i must learn don´t i? cuz it´s really important to us designers to resize images whiout losing resolution isn´t it?

well i continue with the coloring step, i hope i won´t get other problems otherwise i will need ur help loool!!!

tks again and i will send u my final result to prove u how good theather are u !!

Matt

Hi, I cant seem to get the white areas to appear, I think i have exported it correctly as a tif and with a white background. Yet after using the silhouette tool with what must be the right settings and even ungrouping the grouped layer I cant find any white areas, only my line art.

Very nice tutorial, I usually just do pencil work, then linework with black ink pen, then fix up linework in photoshop. Then color in photoshop, then add some effect on it.. I don’t know how to use illustrator properly, althought the work may seems like an illustrator work, if you zoom in close to my work.. there are lots of flaws and grains and everything.. pixelation too!:D

Davo

I am unable to see your images, I’m using a PC. I think I saw a post you made about some kind of viewer for psd and ai files? Why don’t you just take screen shots of the pictures and save those as jpegs so every one can view them? Or maybe it’s just my computer that won’t let me view your images.

k-mix graphics

respect…i’ve been searching for this kind of tutorial for ages…it has a lot of details,realy speeds you up,and since i just getting started with usage of illustrator(i,ve been working in photoshop for ages) it is really heplpful for a newbie like me…tnx,man!

Sergio Ordonez

Just like the shadows but using layers in screen and soft light mode. Everything is done in Illustrator but if you want my opinion I preffer using Photoshop though Illustrator is better for vector work.

Sometimes when you cut some marks appears, I dont think it will be too outstanding when resizing the image or printing but if you want to get rid of them just move the vertexs a little bit so the areas overlap. Anyway the key is working and working to get that naturality 🙂

arnold

“When I get something decent as a start point, I scan it to Photoshop and start to move things around, play with the facial expressions, the pose and various other elements of the design … until I get something I like (image below).”

I laughed out loud when I read this – I thought I was the only who did this! Nice to know I’m not alone.

eManT

I realize my ink in illustrator, i save it in tiff, and reopen with it. I made my line with Silouhette with same option than you, but i can’t put my color, how you do this ? It’s certainly very simple but i can’t do this 🙁

Thanks for your help, and gratz for your website and tutorials !

Sergio Ordonez

Hi Emant, did you check it´s not a compound path? Check on your layers, it ´s a compound shape you need to release it, select the shape and right click, then click on release. After that you have all the shapes ready to modify.

eManT

Lorenz

i love this tutorial and i want to try this one. It will help my lines to be converted in vector but i cannot download the SILHOUETTE because the site not available. Please help me where i can download Silhouette. thank you

Lorenz

Thank you for prompt response. I am using Illustrator CS but i think live trace is only available in higher version. Do you still have other file for “SilhouettePlugIn.aip” or download-able links? My friend told me that it works best and easy.Hope you can help. thank you

Preston Racette

Aviad

No matter what I do, the scissors tool doesn’t cut any shape into two, and when I use the gradient to shadow a shape it influences the entire originalshape because the scissors didn’t cut it. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

binay

I’d really appreciate it if you could tell me how much time do you spend for character design, inking and colorizing…it seems like hell lotta work. Just curious. That’d help me have patience with my work too 😀

From Instagram

How to become a Professional Mascot Designer?

I created some masterclasses with all my Photoshop tips and tricks about digital inking and digital coloring for mascot design. With my technique and some practice you can also make a living from the characters you imagine.

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